John Gibson, a 56-year-old pastor who taught at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary was found dead by his wife, Christi, on August 24 in their on-campus home.​

Pastor Gibson took his own life after being publicly exposed as an adulterer amid leaked data from the infamous Ashley Madison hack.

“It was a moment that life doesn't prepare you for,” Christi told CNN this week. “I had to call my kids. How do you tell your kids that their dad is gone and that he took his own life?” ....​

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Christi said that being outed “carried such a shame” for her husband.​

In a suicide note, “he talked about depression. He talked about having his name on there, and he said he was just very, very sorry,” Christi told CNN. “What we know about him is that he poured his life into other people, and he offered grace and mercy and forgiveness to everyone else, but somehow he couldn’t extend that to himself.”​

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Speaking to CNN this week, Christi said she had a “message” for the millions of people impacted by the breach.​

“These were real people with real families, real pain and real loss,” she said. But “don't underestimate the power of love. Nothing is worth the loss of a father and a husband and a friend. It just didn't merit it. It didn't merit it at all.”​

This is too high a price for such cowardly self-righteousness as the Ashley Madison hack and leak represents. Authorities in Toronto continue investigating links between the data dump and two suicides last month; police Staff Superintendent Bryce Evans used a press conference last month to remind the hackers, "Your actions are illegal and won't be tolerated."CBC↱ reported:

But [Evans] said what's happening to the site's users — who weren't necessarily having affairs – is "no joke."

The nature of Ashley Madison's website, he said, is "of no interest" to investigators and the only criminal wrongdoing in the case has been committed by the hackers.​

This is already ugly; it's only going to get worse.
____________________Notes:

Just so we're clear: I'll take your doubts over the words of adulterous Ashley Madison users ... is that about right?

Click to expand...

Speaking statistically, SG's probably about correct. The actual users were seemingly relatively very rare. The 'words' of adulterers were, similarly, relatively rare and there seem to have been few women on the site. Ottawa was proclaimed as a mecca for adulterers, with a purported fifth of the population being signed up - yet a check of the actual records found only about 1200 people. Now, over say ten years or so, that might about to even 10,000 people using the system and then dropping it - but even then, with few actual women using the site, and any number of spurious accounts, and the fact that one apparently had to pay for the service of finding the, er, 'serviceable', that number falls further. Most infidelity probably goes on in the normal, personal way rather than wholesale on a paid subscription site.

Considering that men and women have said they have had affairs or met up with people for sex from the site, I think it is a bit silly to declare that no one was doing any actual adultery.

As for the number of women who used the site.

After I published my first article about Ashley Madison data, I got several dozen emails from women and men who told me their stories about using the service. Some agreed with my assessment that the place is a sexbot farm. But many women described how they’d enjoyed the service for years, and men talked in glowing terms about all the amazing women they’d met, including some who fell in love and formed relationships after their “affair.”

Several women specifically urged me to investigate how “women seeking women” were handled in the database and code. Many had met other women for threesomes with men, or just for a lesbian romp outside their heterosexual marriages. I decided to take their advice, because now it was clear that a lot more women were active in the membership than I initially believed.

What I found was that there are over 770,000 women seeking women in the database, out of 5.5 million women overall, and none of them are hosts. That’s 14 percent, much higher than the estimated 1.5 percent of lesbians (and .9 percent of bisexuals) in the U.S. population. These may not be active accounts, but they don’t appear to be Ashley Madison engagers either. If there are real women behind these accounts, we know they aren’t getting bombarded with bot messages. Bots avoid women. And comments in the code reveal that “woman seeking woman” profiles aren’t shown to straight men. It would seem that the only members of Ashley Madison who aren’t inundated by spam and randos are women who seek trysts with other women or couples.

[...]

Nobody thought much about women either. Now that we know how rarely women were contacted by bots, it seems certain that any human woman on the site would have been able to meet human men with little difficulty or interference. There is a certain freedom in being the group that is ignored the most. Hiding in a haze of spam bots, women were connecting with each other and with men. We don’t know how many, nor how often, but we know they were doing it.​

Now, the fembots used by the site were.. well.. I suppose numerous could be the word used. The article has the actual codes the bots were using and the prompts, which you can read in the article. I am not going to post them here. Either way, there were a hell of a lot of them and they had a purpose and yes, that purpose was to get the males seeking females for sex, to buy more credit and then once those males bought their credits and spent a large wad of cash, they would then be passed on to an actual woman or contact, who it appears were then possibly passing them off to an escort service for sex.

Mr. Falcon pointed out that there’s actually a special bot service, called [retracted] apparently designed just for interactions with customers who paid the premium $250 for a “guaranteed affair.” When I checked the code, I found Mr. Falcon was right. It appears that this bot would chat up the man, urge him to pay credits, and then pass him along to what’s called an “affiliate.” Likely the affiliate is a third party that provides a real person for the man to chat with. It might also be connecting him to an escort service.​

Yes, I did remove the code. It's in the article, but I would rather not post the code for the bot service here.